Batchelor felt quite ill at ease, following so precisely in the footsteps of Charles Dickens. As they walked down Cable Street towards Canton Kitty’s he could almost sense the author by his side, excited at the prospect of a pipe of the poppy in the dark of the den. Batchelor hadn’t been keen to knock his idol from his perch, but the facts were stacking up against him now; just because he was a womanizer and a drug addict didn’t stop him from being the world’s greatest writer. After Edgar Allan Poe, no author’s life nor death could be considered that dissolute or peculiar; although there was clearly something not quite right about the last days of Dickens, at least he was wearing his own clothes when he died. Or was he? Batchelor made a mental note to find out.
‘This must be it.’ Grand broke into Batchelor’s thoughts.
Batchelor looked at the door, discreetly lit by a gas jet in a cage above it. There was no sign, no door knocker even, just a small grille set at approximate head height. Could this really be the place? How could a drug-addled visitor ever find it?
Grand tapped on the door and the grille immediately swung open. In the shadows within, a face loomed closer. ‘Yes?’ It was hard to tell from just one word, but it didn’t sound like the rough patois of Edwin Drood’s opening. Still, the night was young.
Before setting out, Grand and Batchelor had agreed the form of words they would use and had also decided that Grand should do the talking. A foreign accent would probably stand them in better stead than Batchelor’s local but well-spoken tones. Grand laid it on a bit thick.
‘Hi y’all.’ Batchelor poked him in the back and he toned it down. ‘I’m new in town and I’m as desperate as a porcupine in a melon patch for a pipe of the good stuff.’ He felt rather silly saying that, and avoided Batchelor’s sardonic eye, but it did the trick and the door eased open just far enough to let them in. The hall was dim but clean and tidy. They had expected to stumble over bodies as soon as they were inside, but the only person living, unconscious or dead, that they could see was the one who had let them in. It was a woman, that much they could tell, small and dressed simply. Her hair was tightly wound into a bun at the nape of her neck and her evening dress was dark in colour and fitted like a glove. She stood, hands folded in front of her, and she seemed to be waiting for something. The agents shuffled their feet; this wasn’t what they were expecting and their thoughts were the same: could this possibly be Canton Kitty’s, the most notorious opium den in London?
The woman sighed. ‘Do you gentlemen have the password?’ she said, in genteel tones.
‘Hell no,’ Grand said, keeping up his subterfuge. ‘We jest heerd …’
The woman sighed again and held up a hand. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘We really don’t need theatrics, do we? Has someone sent you here or are you just here on the trail of Edwin Drood? Um …’ The woman bowed her head momentarily. ‘You do know it’s fiction, do you?’
Grand and Batchelor were frankly amazed. It was as though the woman had read their minds. Batchelor was first to recover. ‘It’s more the trail of Charles Dickens we are on,’ he said. ‘We were friends of his.’
‘I am very sorry for your loss,’ the woman said. ‘If you were friends of Charles’s then you are welcome, of course, and you won’t be expecting all that five passed-out sailors in one bed nonsense. That will save us a lot of time.’ She stepped into the light shed by the candelabra discreetly placed around the hall. She was about Dickens’s age, but very well preserved. Her cheek was olive but she had clearly never been nearer Shanghai than the two enquiry agents had. She saw their expressions and chuckled. ‘I see Charles didn’t share my little secret. No, I am not, nor ever have been, Chinese. My father, God rest his soul, was a librarian in a private house in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. My mother died when I was very small, but was a very cultured woman, by all accounts. But a librarian doesn’t leave enough for a daughter to live on and I had a flair for business and so …’ she spread her arms and smiled, ‘here I am. Now,’ she stepped forward and linked one arm through Grand’s and one through Batchelor’s, ‘how can I amuse you two gentlemen today? Not personally, of course. Those days are very much behind me, thank heaven. Are you really here for the poppy?’ she asked Grand, ‘or do you have more exotic tastes? Many of our gentlemen who are not used to smoking prefer to take their poppy in more palatable form. We stock all the best laudanum brands; I must say I recommend that if you have a favourite you already use at home, it’s best to stick to that here. It saves …’ and she gave another of her little deprecatory head bobs, ‘incidents.’
Batchelor, remembering his visit to Gads Hill, said, ‘I personally favour McMunn’s.’
‘An excellent choice,’ she said, squeezing his arm in a friendly manner. ‘Now, the only other thing I need to know is, do you want to indulge together?’
‘Or?’ Grand wanted to hear the options.
‘Well, or separately, of course,’ she said. This time it was Grand’s arm which had the little squeeze. ‘Other options are whether you want to have one of the girls to join you, again, together or separately or, and this is quite popular, would you like to join the small party I have in my own apartments. I would warn you, though, that the party is more for …’
Batchelor filled in the gap. ‘Addicts?’
She dropped his arm. ‘Addicts?’ she said. ‘I fear you have been reading dear Charles’s book. Or Silas Marner – you look like a reader.’ She made it sound like an insult. ‘And what I always say is,’ she said, drawing herself up in outrage, ‘what Mary Ann Evans doesn’t know about laudanum could be written on the back of a very small envelope. However,’ she came down off her high horse and pushed open a door, ‘I think we’ll start you two young gentlemen off easily, until you find what you want. After that, we’ll see.’
With a light push, they were in the room and the door was closed firmly behind them. In the silence, they could hear muffled piano music and also conversation, with the occasional high-pitched shriek, quickly stifled. The room itself was small and dark; in the corner there was a bed, unmade but clean-looking. A single candle burned in a sconce on the wall.
‘Not what I was expecting at all,’ Batchelor muttered to Grand.
‘What was you expecting?’
The voice, coming from the shadows beneath the candle, made them both jump.
‘I expect you was expecting lascar sailors and young university gents with yellow skin and eyes like dark pools, wasn’t you?’ The owner of the voice stepped out and a pretty young girl came into view. She was deliberately dressed to look much younger than her actual years, but her eyes were knowing and her voice tired. ‘Well, Kitty don’t allow that sort of thing and, anyways, how could they afford it? Talking of which, that’ll be a half-sovereign, gents, if you both wants the works. If it’s just one of you, it’s still a half-sovereign.’ The girl broke into a throaty laugh. ‘You’ll excuse my little joke, I know.’
Batchelor swallowed hard. ‘And if we don’t want the works?’ he said. ‘If we just want some laudanum?’
‘It’s still half a sovereign,’ she said, getting surly. ‘A girl has a living to make. Kitty’s kind enough as they go, but she ain’t a charity, you know.’
Grand fished out the money and passed it over. It disappeared faster than winking inside her bodice and she started to haul up her skirts. ‘Well, now,’ she said. ‘That’s more like it. Who’s first?’
‘Neither of us,’ Batchelor said, quickly.
‘Oh, it’s just the drops, then?’ she said, going over to a small table under the light. ‘How much d’you want? You don’t have to take it all at once …’
‘No,’ Grand said. ‘Not drops either. We were wondering if you had ever met Charles Dickens.’
‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘You paid me money just for that. It’s a quick answer. No. None of us girls met him. He used to go straight through to Kitty’s private party. Him and the woman.’
‘Woman?’ Grand and Batchelor looked at each other. This could prove fruitful.
The girl stood with her back still to them, the drops measured in a small glass. ‘Are you sure you don’t …’
Grand grunted.
‘Then, may I …?’
‘Be our guest.’ They watched as she knocked back the double dose and waited a moment for them to take effect.
‘Oh, that’s better.’ She plumped down in the chair. She lifted a hem and revealed an expanse of bare thigh. ‘You sure?’
‘Positive,’ they chorused.
Her hand went slack but the skirt stayed where it was. ‘No,’ she said, her eyelids drooping. ‘We never got to see Mr High-An’-Mighty Dickens. He’d come round the back, him and the woman …’ her head lolled.
‘Wake up!’ Batchelor said, leaning forward to slap her hand and accidentally getting thigh.
‘Sorry …’ she pulled at the hem again. ‘I thought you said …’ And this time, she was asleep beyond any waking, a smile on her face. She really did look like a child, with all the worry wiped from her face by the poppy’s caress.
Batchelor looked at her with wide eyes. ‘Matthew?’ he breathed. ‘Is she dead? That was a hefty dose she took.’
Grand went closer and felt her wrist, then lifted an eyelid. The pupil rolled up into her head and she tried to bat him away. ‘She’s alive,’ he said. ‘But we’ll get no more out of her.’ He lifted her effortlessly and carried her across to the bed, where he tucked her in. He dropped a featherlight kiss on her forehead. ‘She’s had an easy night of it tonight,’ he said, looking down at her.
‘This is probably a good enough place to ply her trade,’ Batchelor said. ‘It beats under the arches for the price of a bed, any day.’
Grand looked at him and smiled. ‘That is so like you, James. Always see the ointment, never the fly.’
Batchelor tried to work out whether that was a compliment or not, but couldn’t be sure. ‘Shall we go?’ he said. ‘Before Kitty comes back.’
‘I think that may be a good plan,’ Grand agreed. ‘A tactical withdrawal. And we did more or less get what we came for. Even if that wasn’t quite what Kitty was expecting.’
‘Did we?’ Batchelor whispered. He had opened the door and was peering out. The coast was clear, so they edged out and tiptoed across the hall.
‘Yes,’ Grand said as they eased the thick oak door closed behind them. ‘Dickens did go to Kitty’s and went to the parties for the more – shall we call them – committed opium eaters. And, he went with a woman.’
‘We still don’t know who.’ It was a fair point.
‘True. But the chances are that the lady in the case has a fair amount of laudanum about her person. Perfect for slipping into Dickens’s food or drink or even just feeding to him as a treat. We’re getting closer, James. Closer all the time.’
The old church clock of St George in the East was striking three as Grand and Batchelor left Canton Kitty’s. There was no moon to splash the gravestones with silver, only the pale slab of the river to their left where the lighters bobbed black. Both of them had heard the footfalls that were not their own and both of them had imperceptibly speeded up their walk. Matthew Grand’s strides usually had James Batchelor scrabbling to keep up, but tonight he matched him step for step. Bluegate Fields was not a place to be after dark and it was that hour in the metropolis when the dark was at its blackest before dawn. Soon the cabmen and the costers would be about, trudging to their carts for another long, sweating day. The labourers would be swarming to the dock gates of St Catherine’s and the Black Eagle to wait in hopeful line for news of a cargo ship that would bring them work. If not, and the ships only needed a handful each time, they would have to find their tommy where they could and crawl back to the arches in Pinchin Street to catch some sleep. Until the next time, when the only social round they knew would begin all over again.
‘How many?’ Batchelor whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
‘I count three,’ Grand whispered back. Of all the nights to leave his thumb-breaker at home. If push came to shove, fists were all they had. Fists, and the perfectly timed boot.
‘Is that the three behind us or the three in front?’ Batchelor’s question was louder now because there suddenly seemed no point in subterfuge. Blocking the path that ran between the graveyard and the river wall, three large roughs in fustian stood with folded arms.
Grand and Batchelor stopped. There was a shed to their right, a rickety, single-storey building that had seen better days. Batchelor read Grand’s mind. ‘No hiding place there,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the mortuary. If you’re hoping for help from anybody inside there, you’ll have a rather long wait. Who are they? Williamson’s boys?’
‘Now, we’re not looking for trouble, fellas,’ Grand called out to the men ahead.
Batchelor turned so that the two men stood back to back and he was facing the three who had been following them since Cable Street. ‘Honestly,’ he said. ‘No trouble at all.’
‘Right,’ the man in the centre facing Grand said. ‘We’ll start with the wallets.’
‘Oh, you’re Irish,’ Batchelor beamed, changing places with Grand. ‘That’s refreshing in this part of London.’
‘We’ve got a joker, Sean,’ another man grunted. ‘A regular comedian.’
‘He’s an idol of the Halls,’ Grand said to the men in front of him. ‘Always tries out his new material on riff-raff from the bogs.’
The silence was tangible.
‘I said, the wallets,’ Sean repeated.
‘Oh, darn,’ Grand drawled, patting his jacket. ‘I’ve been and gone and left the dang thing at home.’
‘What a coincidence,’ Batchelor said. ‘So have I.’
‘It’s a double act, Sean,’ Sean’s man observed. He was sliding a club out of the wide sleeve of his coat.
‘So it is,’ Sean grunted. ‘I particularly like that one’s fake American accent.’
All six of the roughs were closing in now, and Grand wasn’t about to let them get any closer. He drove his boot into Sean’s groin and caught the man next to him with a left cross. Batchelor ran forward, driving his shoulder into somebody’s chest and sending them both sprawling. A club whizzed past Grand’s head and he grabbed the man swinging it and butted him, the Irishman screaming in pain as the blood spread over his face. Batchelor was back on his feet, trading punches with a man who stood a head taller. He felt a crack to his temple and his vision blurred as he staggered under a cudgel blow. Grand poleaxed another of them with both fists to the man’s chest, but he wasn’t ready for the club that caught him on the shoulder and he dropped to one knee.
‘No time to rest on your laurels now, Matthew,’ Batchelor hissed, and he lunged at the nearest man, bowling him over and grappling with him in the grass. Grand was on his feet again and he ducked below another flying club before bouncing its owner’s head against a gravestone. He tried to grab the club itself but he felt his arms pinioned and he was forced to the ground. Any second now, he knew, the boots and the clubs would rain down and it would be all over.
Batchelor heard it first, as a huge Irishman was strangling him with his own tie. A deafening, staccato rattle that was getting nearer. ‘Over here, boys,’ a voice called.
The rattle continued and a dark figure was suddenly amongst them, cracking heads and throwing men about.
‘Another time,’ Sean grunted in Grand’s ear before slapping him around the head and the roughs pulled back.
‘Come on, lads,’ the voice shouted. ‘They’re getting away!’ And the rattle died as the men vanished into the darkness. When Grand and Batchelor stood up, shaking and bloody, where they had expected to see a small army of policemen, they saw the rotund bulk of ex-Chief Inspector Field.
‘Lads?’ Batchelor said, looking around.
Field laughed. ‘Never fails,’ he said. He swung his wooden rattle once more with its deafening clatter that echoed through the graveyard. ‘I’m glad I kept this little souvenir of better days. You must be Mr Batchelor.’ He held out his hand. ‘Charlie Field.’
‘Impeccable timing, Mr Field,’ Grand said. ‘A few more minutes there and we might really have hurt them.’ He held something up in the light of the creeping dawn. ‘One of yours, James?’
Batchelor felt his jaw. ‘No,’ he said, running his tongue around his mouth. ‘Not mine.’
‘Nor mine,’ Grand said and he threw the bloody tooth away. ‘Something else for the charnel house, then.’
‘We’re grateful, Mr Field,’ Batchelor said, trying to straighten his tie. The knot was pulled so tight it was hard to move. ‘And what luck you happened to be passing.’
‘What’s luck got to do with it?’ Field chuckled. ‘I’ve been trailing you boys for the last twelve hours.’
‘You have?’ Batchelor frowned. ‘Why?’
Field looked at him. ‘I’m afraid you’re in over your heads, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the West End with doilies and tea parties. Look at a man funny here and he’ll rearrange your face. As you almost discovered. I thought you’d end up at Canton Kitty’s eventually.’
‘You knew about her?’ Grand asked, stooping as best he could to retrieve his hat.
‘Everybody knows about Canton Kitty. I remember when she used to starch the collars for her old man’s laundry. More innocent days, then, of course. I assume you went there in search of Dickens, as it were.’
‘You know about that, too?’ It was Batchelor’s turn to ask a question.
Field laughed. ‘I expect Dolly Williamson will have made some observations to you two about amateurs and professionals; and, pain me though it does, I’m afraid I have to echo him.’
There was a sound of running feet and a helmeted copper was hurtling towards them, swerving around the headstones, his boots clattering on the flags.
‘What’s the trouble here?’ he said, trying to catch his breath.
‘Whatever it was,’ Field told him, ‘it was all over five minutes ago. You’ll have to do better than that, boy.’
‘Oh, it’s you, Chief Inspector. Sorry, guv. I couldn’t place the rattle’s direction.’
Field closed to him. ‘What’s your name, lad?’ he asked.
‘Berryman, sir,’ the copper answered, standing straight with his thumbs down the seams of his trousers.
‘How old are you?’
‘Nineteen, sir.’
Field chuckled, then frowned. ‘You’re on point, aren’t you? Cable Street?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Then what the Hell are you doing here, lad?’ Field shouted. ‘Point is point and you never leave it even if all London’s burning. Is that clear?’
‘Yessir.’ Constable Berryman stood to attention even more, if that were possible. He hadn’t been born when Chief Inspector Field was doing his rounds, but somehow that made it all the worse.
‘Cut along back there, then,’ Field said quietly.
‘Yessir, thank you, sir. Er … you won’t be mentioning this to the sarge, will you?’
‘Who is it?’ Field asked.
‘Gallagher.’
‘God, no,’ Field grunted. ‘I’d rather gouge my eyes out. Run along, now.’
And Berryman saluted and was gone.
‘J Division!’ Field tutted and his eyes rolled skywards.
‘Do you know all the policemen in London?’ Grand asked.
‘Hardly know any of ’em these days,’ Field confessed. ‘But whippersnappers like young Berryman there need to think I do. I wouldn’t know Sergeant Gallagher if I fell over him.’ He looked at them both, sliding the rattle into his pocket. ‘No, the reason I know about Charles Dickens going to Canton Kitty’s is that I took him there.’
‘You did?’ Batchelor asked.
‘Of course. You can’t expect a man like Dickens to go alone to places like that. He insisted, though. He wanted local colour for the opening of Edwin Drood. Have you read it, either of you?’
‘Every word,’ Batchelor assured him.
‘Hmm,’ Grand said, with much less commitment.
‘I have to say, old friend that I was and one of his greatest admirers, I don’t think he quite captured an opium den, do you? And if the old crone he’s writing about is supposed to be Canton Kitty, he’s woefully wide of the mark there, I’d say.’
‘Did anything happen there?’ Batchelor asked. ‘Anything … untoward?’
Field laughed. ‘What, apart from the hallucinations, the visions of Hell and falling over a couple of dozen Jack Chinamen? No, it was just like tea with the vicar.’
‘Sorry,’ Batchelor muttered. ‘Silly question, really.’
Field drew a cigar from its leather case and offered the rest of the contents to Grand and Batchelor. They declined. Batchelor couldn’t feel his jaw and Grand was having difficulty raising his right arm. ‘I think old Charles regretted going to Bluegate Fields myself. Venomous place. A lascar held a knife to his throat; if I hadn’t intervened, he’d have been done for. So, all joking apart, how’s your investigation coming along, then?’